The details regarding the Ethereum Roadmap 2020 are revealed. According to the Ethereum Roadmap 2020, the Ethereum’s blockchain which lets developers build small contracts and DApps on its platform is now passing through its last phase of development.
Ethereum’s last phase of development is Serenity after which the launch of Ethereum 2.0 is expected.
The Serenity Stage
Ethereum looks to make its blockchain faster, scalable, and better in this last stage of development i.e. the Serenity stage. According to the blockchain software technology firm ConsenSys, there are five design principles that will guide the Serenity stage. These are simplicity, resilience, longevity, security, and decentralization.
Four phases of the Serenity Roadmap
Several major network upgrades for the Ethereum ecosystem are expected to occur in the Serenity Roadmap through four phases. The followings are these four phases of development:
The first phase of the Serenity is Phase 0 which is also known as the beacon chain phase. In this phase, a new beacon chain will be created which will be totally different from the main Ethereum blockchain. The movement of the network from proof-of-work (PoW) to the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus will be executed. The Beacon Chain phase has three main responsibilities. These are:
- Managing the proof of stake mechanism
- Processing crosslinks
- Direct consensus and finality
The next phase of Serenity is Phase 1 (Shard Chains) where the Ethereum network will work on scalability which is the key for the network adoption in the future. Sharding will improve the scalability of newly created blockchain as the main function of sharding is to deal with the parallel transactions, storing, and processing of information. So, it will also increase the number of transactions that the network will process at the same time.
Phase 2 (eWASM) of Serenity will focus on the functionality of Ethereum 2.0. A new Virtual Machine – Ethereum-flavored Web Assembly (eWASM)- will be introduced in this phase. The performance of eWASM is expected to be improved as compared to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). So, this phase will basically focus on upgrading the network from EVM to eWASM to enable the support of smart contracts on the new blockchain. The launch of eWASM is expected to take place in 2021.
The final phase of serenity is Phase 3 which is the Continued improvement stage. In this phase, the Ethereum network will continue to look for further updates and improvements of the protocol. Phase 3 of Serenity will focus on:
- Lightweight state protocol
- Coupling with mainchain security
- Super-quadratic or exponential sharding
These are the main developments and upgrades that will occur throughout the Ethereum Roadmap 2020 via these four phases of the Serenity stage.
